And, like, literally everyone since Adam Smith and his pins.

Assessing how good people are at skill A by trying to determine how good they are at ever-so-slightly-related skill B is what led google and the rest of the valley down the ridiculous problem solving interview quest of the aughts. Take your manhole covers and suck on them!

Abstraction is a skill, one that’s difficult to assess in an hour-long interview, but one which allows me to say “I’m great at C# but I’ll call someone when the printer is broken” - because there are only so many hours in the day.